


Tenavia

by samarasharazi



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Accident, Bittersweet Ending, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Imaginary Friends, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-02-16 02:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21499990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarasharazi/pseuds/samarasharazi
Summary: I once built a kingdom, an island full of people that adored me. I built a throne room inside my palace, a ruling made for two.I once built a world for a little Taeyong to cope with the small hardships. Then I used it to drag me through the rest of my life. I don't need it anymore, I have something better.So I give it to my little girl and I hope one day she'll be happy too.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Lee Taeyong, Lee Taeyong/Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29





	Tenavia

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! 
> 
> This piece of writing is actually quite special to me, I'd originally written as a piece of writing with my own characters who were females. 
> 
> Please, please, don't forget to comment about what you thought about this and leave a kudos, this is one fic i would really appreciate words. I love you all and thank you.
> 
> (Hi, I reuploaded this because I found too many mistakes so I decided to re-edit and post this again. What can I say, it just needs some more love ;)

When I was seven years old I didn’t just make an imaginary friend to play with, I made a whole country. Not knowing my geography as a child (like most other children), I’d said it was dab smack right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere near what I used to call ‘Hawakiki’.

It was more like an island rather a big block of land like America, and its inhabitants were the Gelato People. I’d visited Italy once and suddenly I knew everything, including every flavour of gelato at the corner shop in Venice by our hotel. Back then, my favourite flavour was ‘Chocolate Fantasy’ like any other basic child trying to satisfy their cravings for something tooth-rotting. I’ve come to visit that same very shop twenty years later and can confirm that I have developed my tastes into something more for the developed palette and favoured the ‘Pistachio & Cream’ combination. I must say that I indeed did feel quite sophisticated when I was able to truly say I favoured that flavour more than chocolate or lemon.

The people in my island all looked like humans, acted like humans and spoke a language seven year old me would’ve been able to understand. The only difference was that they had neon pink hair. Naturally. If you were deviant and wanted to rebel against your parents, you would dye it aqua to stand out or raven black to migrate to another country. Seven year old me had made some very interesting life choices.

The first person to ever question my imagination was my best friend at the time, a little chubby boy by the name of Doyoung (who is surprisingly now my husband). He had wondered why I was sat in the sandpit all alone talking to myself as I built a tall castle with wet sand.

“What are you doing?” he asked kindly, sitting down beside me to reach for some of my building tools. He wanted to help.

“Talking to my friends,” I had responded.

From that day on, I had named my country Doyolaia as a tribute to the boy who sat by me and made it all better. I even declared he have a throne beside mine in the Doyolaia Palace right in the capital city. The people loved him, said that we made the perfect rulers.

I imagined myself to be the perfect diplomat even if I hadn’t known what that word meant yet. I said I would execute any person who did not come to my palace and give me a dance every year in order for them to satisfy my needs.

Doyoung had suggested to me on my eighth birthday to put up a new school right next to the palace where all they taught you how to do was make milkshakes. My mum had once come home to find to find both of us sitting on the sticky floor with weird smelling milk around us. The open blender was still flying out our weird concoctions above our heads. Doyoung hadn’t been allowed to come over to my house for a whole year after that, we were only allowed to go to his.

On my ninth birthday, I’d cried because the Gelato People wanted to cut down the ice cream tree in favour of planting a donut tree instead. I hated donuts afterwards. Didn’t matter if the sap of the tree was chocolate sauce to dip them in.

My parents asked me about my imaginary world one day and asked me to describe it for them. Though I tried my best to make them see what she clearly could, they didn’t understand anything. When they saw I was clearly about to cry, they brought out these very pretty pencils and markers with a nice book of paper and asked me to draw it for them. They said I could have all the time in the world.

I spent the whole of that year drawing everything my mind could see and hear, using every single colour in the pack to draw what I could see my world looked like. I still have those pages now today, somehow locked behind a set of keys to be brought out whenever my little girl begs me to see them.

When I turned ten however, my sister had turned sick and was admitted to the hospital via emergency. I didn’t get to celebrate my birthday that year, I just sat in the waiting room as both my parents panicked and cried. I hadn’t understood what was going on.

The doctors said they had scanned my sister and found a brain tumour.

Suddenly my world wasn’t so bright anymore, their hair colours went from pink to a natural blonde and brown and the flowers wilted over time. There were no longer any rainbow butterflies flying in the air, no more music that the people in the town square danced to. Everything was just quiet and all I did was cry in my throne room.

Doyoung made me come over to his house every day after school, tried his best to cheer me up. Sometimes it would work and you’d hear laughs echoing through the palace, resuming the music outside for a short while. In those whole two years, it was only my best friend that kept me floating.

I hated coming to the hospital just to see my pretty little sister without any hair on her head. I hated seeing my parents’ sad faces. I hated seeing my mum cry at two o’clock in the morning.

It was only a month before my twelve birthday when my parents had come home with bright faces and tears down their faces, telling me the news I’d been waiting to hear for almost two years.

My sister was finally cancer free.

We celebrated my birthday with the biggest cake and too many presents to fit into my room, with me stitched right to my sister’s side. Every time I saw her smiling, I cried so much that the rivers in Doyolaia overflowed. I was just so happy.

Day by day, my sister’s hair started to grow back and every day she would ask me if I could style it for her. Every day I sat with her on her bed and told her stories about Doyolaia as I put pretty butterfly clips in her hair when it was still too short or made little braids that tamed the thick curls she had finally grown back.

The first day of high school had been one of the hardest days of my life. No one I knew was beside me, I was all alone in a school much bigger than my previous one. The comfort of my imaginary world could do nothing when I finally was able to see grandiosity of being a big boy, being mature and independent. I finally realised that in order to grow, I had to let go of the things that still made me a child.

I didn’t make friends that first year, nor many in the second either. I was fifteen the first time I met someone who I thought genuinely could like me for me. He became my best friend and he made me happier than I’ve ever been.

I hadn’t imagined Doyolaia in two years.

This someone’s name was Ten, a kind-eyed Thai boy who was much taller than me the first time we met. By the time we would finish high school however, I would be taller than him.

He was the first person that came out to me. Since my sister’s tumour, I hadn’t experienced any sort of confrontation. I soon realised what my biggest fear was.

It took me a while but I accepted who he was. Then I thought maybe I could trust him with something too. I told him about the island I hadn’t thought about in years, the people, the trees, the throne room. At the time I didn’t realise that I hadn’t mentioned there were two kings that ruled the land, two equal thrones in the throne room.

I realised why soon enough.

On my sixteenth birthday, I was hit with the revelation that I liked boys. The next day I slept for fifteen hours straight. I didn’t tell anyone for a whole year, I hadn’t talk to Doyoung in such a long time.

I started sleeping more, waking up guilty more, feeling tired more. My grades started to drop and I started losing my friends at school. I talked less to my sister and my parents and I would lock my door most of the time so people wouldn’t come in.

It was Ten who had come to my house one day and seen my drawings of Doyolaia from years ago when he had suggested I redo them, find another purpose to myself. I’d told him that my imagination wasn’t important to me anymore, that it had all been child fantasy in order to live an easier life.

He gave me this expensive set of alcohol markers and pencils for my seventeenth birthday, pushing the wrapped gift into my hands with that perfect smile he always reserved for his closest friends. Sometimes it hurt me so much just to see it.

For months, I didn’t touch the present and left it on the edge of my desk. I looked at it every night, falling asleep to the silhouette of its straight lines and wrapping twine. It was only after my mother took me to be assessed by a psychiatrist that I opened it.

I was coming to my final year of school, year twelve. Every fortnight, I would go to the psychiatrist and sit in his office, waiting for him to speak. I think he got tired of speaking to me so he gave me medication instead. I had cried on the phone to Ten that night, falling asleep to his sweet voice.

The next day I had pulled Ten aside at school and told him I was gay.

When I came home that night, I started using his present to recreate the drawings I had done seven years before.

I let my mind imagine Doyolaia, the Gelato People. I imagined the donut tree beside the grand bridge and the rainbow butterflies that landed in its leaves. The pink coloured hair of all the citizens, the kangaroos that were used like cars. I remembered everything.

The only thing missing was the boy sitting on his throne beside mine.

Each day I started to take the medication, progressing on them slowly until my body could handle the intrusion of the drug. It turned from 20mg to 40mg in the time that I was able to finish three complete artworks of Doyolaia, showing each of them to Ten and then my family once they were finished.

My eighteenth birthday consisted of a party Ten had decided to throw for me, inviting the whole grade and their boyfriends and girlfriends, filling his large house to the brim. I wasn’t allowed to have much alcohol to the orders of both my parents and Ten since I was still on my medication.

I had my first kiss at that party. It was with a random boy I hadn’t known prior, we were simply dancing together when he had asked me politely if he could kiss me. I hadn’t said no.

I thought maybe if I let myself be distracted by someone else, I wouldn’t have to track my eyes to the boy who was sitting on top of Ten with their hands up his shirt.

By then, I had finished six artworks of Doyolaia.

That night when everyone had left and I was in the bed with Ten in the bathroom getting ready for sleep, I couldn’t help but open my phone and search for Doyoung's name on Facebook.

It wasn’t hard to find him, but the notion of seeing his face all grown up knocked all the wind out me. I was suddenly seeing the two boys sitting in the sandpit, building the palace they would rule Doyolaia in. I could hear the giggles behind the door under the staircase when they were playing hide and seek. All the memories I thought were long forgotten sprang right back to the top of my mind.

Ten cuddled me to sleep that night.

Two months before my nineteenth birthday, I finally came out to my parents. Ten stood proudly by my side. My sister had known for a long time, before even Ten. She just simply smiled and gave me a proud nod.

I come from a traditional Korean family, I was scared to say anything to my parents. So many times had I heard my grandfather calling the gay people on the TV screen ‘faggots’ and change the channel, so many times had I heard my parents make snark jokes about men holding hands on the streets or women smiling at each other.

It took them a long time, I knew it would. I also knew they would love me no matter what. I gave them time just like they had given me when they asked me to draw what my world looked like. It was all the love inside of me I had for them that kept me smiling even when I didn’t want to.

I texted Doyoung for the first time in ten years the week after my twentieth. He didn’t respond right away but that was what I had expected.

“Who are you texting?” Ten asked one day, hands wrapped around my waist. I still hadn’t been able to tell him that I loved him, even after five years. This was my own burden to bear.

“No one,” I said, and let him tighten his hold around me. I let it be my anchor for just a moment.

It had happened when we were at a party for one of the boys. It had been my first time being properly drunk since my medication was given to me and I’d felt so alive.

The night went away so fast and all I did was drink. I’d lost track of Ten from the start and I was too much of a mess to go look for him. I let people who wanted me kiss me, I let them take me to the bathroom and lock the door. I let them push my head to the sink counter and pull down my underwear with my jeans. I let them take me right there in a dirty bathroom, feeling the pain subside slowly turning into something akin to pleasure. I let them finish right inside me with my breath still hitched in my throat.

It was only when I was left alone to look into the mirror when I truly realised what had just happened. My underwear was still stretched around my parted legs when Ten came rushing in to find a broken and abused boy crying into the granite.

I lost my virginity in a drunken state to a man I didn’t even know the name of.

“Taeyong, please open the door,” I had heard too many times over the course of the next week as I holed myself up in my room. The only person I would let into my room was my sister who was a grown teenager now, a bright face that showed no reflection of the girl in the hospital she used to be.

I knew drinking had been a mistake, I was still on my medication after all. The alcohol affected me more than it should’ve, blurred my senses enough for someone else to control it.

I didn’t know what to call what happened in the bathroom that night. Rape? One of the only things I could remember clearly enough about that night were the slurred words that came out of his mouth, the swayed motions he made behind me. I knew he was drunk too. Did that still count as rape? Even if I enjoyed it a little bit, even if I allowed it?

The text from Doyoung came half way through the week. I was confused to what it was at first, I didn’t want to believe that he had finally decided to reach back to me. Beside his text I could see the hundreds of texts Ten had sent me over the past couple of days as well as some of my other close friends.

**Doyoung Kim**

_Hi, I haven’t talked you in forever omg_

_I can’t believe you reached out to me_

_How have you been?_

I remember reading those messages and wondering if this was the same boy from my childhood, the one who comforted me when my sister had still been in the hospital, one who hid chocolate coins in the garden as their own little fairy treasure hunt.

I didn’t respond to him for another week, leaving him on read. I couldn’t bear to start the conversation again. It was just something inside of me that was nagging at the seams. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Ten had been there the first time I stepped out of my room, pulling me into the tightest hug he had ever given me. This way, I felt loved and cherished; I knew someone was out there who cared for me even when they had found me in the worst position.

I loved him for so long.

On my twenty-first birthday, Doyoung sent me a happy birthday text and asked for the first time since we started talking again if we could meet. I didn’t see the text in time. I taken today to finally confess to Ten.

It hadn’t been anything severely fancy, he had taken me out for dinner just the two of us and I’d decided to tell him when we came back home to his house. We were sitting on his bed when I said it, me playing with the rose one of the staff at the restaurant had given me when Ten told them it was my birthday. It made me giggle with pure joy.

“I’ve been in love with you from the moment that we met,” I told him, looking down to the red petals of the rose in my hand, holding my breath.

He made me happy that night, made me feel loved, held me tight when I thought he might let go. I imagined for a moment if maybe he would be the one to sit on the throne beside me, wearing the matching crown on his head while he held my hand. I imagined the people of Doyolaia to be happy with their new king, happy for their happiness.

Then I would wake up the next morning with only the blankets covering my body to remember that Doyolaia was named after Doyoung. I couldn’t just take it away like that. But I was so in love with Ten, I would’ve done anything for him.

On my twenty-second birthday, I painted my last artwork with the oil paints Doyoung bought me as his gift the week before. Without telling anyone, I replaced the artwork that depicted both Doyoung and I cloaked in deep red seated in our jewel-crusted thrones with one that depicted Ten instead, arsenic green cloaks instead. I was smiling more in this version, the true reflection of happiness in my face.

I’d finally come to the conclusion that living in my happiness where the people who surround me are the ones who have created that environment was the point in my life that I had striving to find for too many years.

Around my twenty-third birthday, the people of Doyolaia started to paint murals in tribute to my grandfather who had passed away only a few weeks before. It was their birthday gift to their ageless king. I bestowed a golden key upon each person and asked them to return to their homes.

I was twenty-three when I first changed Doyolaia. I turned the homes of the people into something grander, set purple flames to the forest. I wanted change; I wanted order. I turned the skies night black.

I was twenty-four when I finally moved out of my parents’ house, leaving my adult sister behind with them. I kissed them all goodbye and boarded the plane. I was going to England to fulfil my dreams. I wish I could go to Doyolaia instead.

Ten was upset with me. I knew he was. He hadn’t answered my texts in the past two days. Doyoung already booked a flight for next week to help me settle in. He said he might move in with me.

He told me I should paint a scenic view of the Doyolaia Palace as one of my walls. His suggestion made me happy, maybe it could distract me. I had the base colours done when he arrived, ran to me in the London airport and lunged into my arms. Ten still hadn’t contacted me.

A few days in, Doyoung had officially announced that “Tae, I’m moving in with you!” at one o’clock in the morning. He claimed that it was purely to help me out with the rent, but I was happy nonetheless. I knew he had missed me.

A month later and Ten was at my door, soaked from the rain. He looked like he'd been crying; his eyes were puffy and red. I wanted to hug him tight but he hadn’t spoken to me in two months, I didn’t even know what we were anymore.

I let him take a long and warm shower as I waited on my bed, biting my lip anxiously. Had he come to break up with me? To come tell me that we couldn’t even be the friends we used to be?

We were on my bed, Doyoung's on the other side of the room empty. I was twenty-four when Ten proposed to me in London and while his hair was still wet from the shower. He was smiling at me so brightly.

I was twenty-four years old when I called my parents saying I was engaged. The screams of excitement and joy on the other side made waiting all the more worth it. Ten smiled past me to the wall of the painting I still hadn’t finished, the palace still incomplete but yet beautiful in its own right. He said me that it was as if a piece of the story was unfinished. That we should have the ability to interpret the rest of our destiny.

I was twenty-five when I held the love of my life for the last time in my arms. He kissed me on the nose and smiled with all his teeth, whispering in my ear over and over again about how he loved me. I was twenty-five when I received the heartbreaking call from the hospital asking me to come immediately.

It was Ten on that stretcher, blood mangled throughout his hair, in his clothes. I couldn’t recognise him. I watched as doctors shouted and commanded orders, bringing in several more victims from the car crash on Blackfriars Bridge. I was crying but there was no one there with me. Doyoung said he was coming as soon as he could.

It was only a slow two hours later with him by my side when a doctor walked up to me grimly and shook his head. I fell to the ground screaming.

A week after my twenty-fifth birthday, I came back home and attended Ten's funeral. His parents wouldn’t look at me. I think they blamed his death on me. I blamed it on me too. Doyoung came back with me and held my hand as tightly as he could. I simply leaned on him and watched the casket lower into the ground. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but then did anyway when I was asked to give my speech. How I cried when I talked about how kind of a person Ten had been, only the best person I could’ve asked for in my life.

I slept in the same room Ten sat outside of when I had been raped in that party. I imagined him to still be there, simply just sitting outside waiting for me. I would walk out every morning praying I’d see him on the ground staring up at me.

He wasn’t.

Doyoung and I were taking separate flights back to London; we’d decided I should stay a few days longer. He’d kissed my cheek and wiped away my tears with his thumb before he left for the airport. I watched him leave with the worst broken heart.

I thought I was going to get married and live happily ever after with the one I loved most. I thought it was meant to be. Ten was supposed to be the one to put a wedding band on my finger, to announce his vows to me. Why us? Why him? No one ever explained to me why life to be unfair.

My mother to took me to another appointment to the psychiatrist. They changed my medication to something heavier. Said it’d make me sleepy for the first few days. I welcomed it easily.

I went back to London a week later, unable to let my parents go in the airport. I begged them to come with me. I asked my sister. They all simply shook their heads.

I never finished the mural.

I was twenty-six when Doyoung first kissed me, coming back to the apartment drunk and emotional. He cried about how much he'd missed me in the time we’d stopped talking, saying how much he loved me. Then he kissed me. I pushed him away and told him I’d sleep at a friend’s house.

He apologised the next day, rapid texts making my phone go off. I was at the orphanage the whole day, volunteering just as I did every Saturday. There was one little girl I was particularly attached to, a little half-Chinese girl called Isabelle. She reminded me too much of Ten.

I came home that night exhausted, home to a frantic Doyoung. I smiled at him and accepted the fast apologies slipping off his tongue. I let him hug me tight.

I was twenty-seven when the two of us got married in a big cathedral with pretty stained glass reflecting an array of colours on us. Doyoung looked so beautiful in his sleek white suit, illuminating his radiant smile. He was taller than me now. He smiled to me and I could see a bit of Ten reflected there in him, doing something he could never do. I felt maybe I was marrying both of them then, sewing my heart back into one. My two loves becoming one.

I was twenty-seven when the bells rung and we danced our way down the aisle and to the limousine, watching as all the guests clapped and whistled. I saw Ten’s family clapping for us, their bittersweet smiles creating an ache in my heart. Doyoung held my hand tighter and placed a kiss to my ear. Finally, I was happy again.

When we adopted Isabelle, I showed her the mural of the unfinished palace. I told her about both her fathers’ little imaginary island where the people had pink hair and danced for the king. I passed on the crown to her.

I was thirty when we bought a big house in Bath and moved from London, leaving the wall and all our memories behind. Isabelle insisted we paint a new one in her room. This one this time complete.

Isabelle was seven when she changed the name of the country from Doyolaia to Tenavia to tribute the man her father loved. She took the island and made it hers.

I made that island long ago to cope with the small struggles a little Taeyong faced. I used it long ago when my sister lived in the hospital, when my parents would have big fights that resulted in broken walls and smashed glass. I used it long ago to bring me out of my dark spell of anxiety and depression, to set me a right again. I used it when Ten was taken away from me.

But now I have more than that. I have a husband who loves me, a little girl who always wants me to read her stories. I have my parents who are planning to move closer so can they be with Isabelle, my sister who had gone through her own struggles and still managed to stay strong.

So I give it to my special little girl and I show her my paintings, my drawings of the old Tenavia, Doyolaia. I show her paintings of Ten on the throne beside me, her father on the throne beside me. I describe the rainbow butterflies and the mural of my grandfather the Gelato people did for me. I describe to her the waterfalls of honey, the ones made of the homemade lemonade Doyoung makes for us on the weekends.

I wasn’t happy for a long time, but I am now. I can only hope Isabelle will be happy when she grows up too.

I was thirty-two when we completed the mural of Tenavia on Isabelle’s wall.

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to clarify because some might think this, but Doyoung really isn't a replacement for Ten imo. You can interpret any way you want to, that's the cool thing about this piece, but for me, Taeyong always loved Doyoung from the start. He simply never had the opportunity to act on it. that's my interpretation at least.
> 
> Also sorry still for the mistakes, I don't know if I picked up on everything. Plus, I didn't change the writing so it's still badly written, but its okay.
> 
> I'd love to hear you on here:  
> [my twitter](https://twitter.com/doyounglberry)  
> [my curious cat](https://curiouscat.me/samarasharazi)


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